The Hundred Story Home Read online

  And when he won that last set, I wish I had jumped across the net and given him a bear hug and a victory grin that would have lasted through breakfast and beyond.

  We didn’t say all that we could have. We talked about ways to improve my forehand or his remarkable drop shot. We acted as if there would always be another match, another game.

  Six weeks later, not even a year after his first symptoms began, I called to check on him on a Saturday morning, and he admitted he wasn’t feeling well.

  “Are you going to call your doctor?” I asked.

  “No, I’m sure it is just the hot dog I ate at the UT El Paso basketball game last night,” he said, before adding, “It won’t kill me.”

  My dad, John Leighton Green Jr., died that night, November 15, 1998, at sixty-four.

  It had been only ten months and ten days since we were introduced to leukemia. I may have been thirty-five, but with my father gone I felt abandoned. Until then, in every sandstorm, Dad had always been on the other end of the rope steadfastly holding tight.

  I had many months to contemplate this, to prepare for this moment. I guess that is the small consolation with cancer. You have time to begin to say what should have been said and make up for all the moments that will be stolen from you.

  I gathered my girls to tell them. Lauren was eight, Kailey six, Emma and Maddie, four.

  “You all know Poppy has been sick and that he has been in the hospital a lot.” I couldn’t keep my voice from cracking. Lauren didn’t know what I was trying to tell her, but she knew it wasn’t good.

  “But he’s going to be okay, right, Mom?”

  There was no lying on this one, no making it better, no softening it. As much as I never wanted my girls to be sad or hurt, there was no fixing this. I touched her blond head and started crying. “No, honey, I’m sorry. He won’t be okay. Poppy died last night.”

  I’m not sure Kailey, Emma, and Maddie fully grasped the situation, but they knew if Lauren was crying, they should be crying too.

  Laurenkaileyemmamaddie. One body, four hearts.

  Emma must have been thinking about her other grandfather’s garden overflowing with vegetables in Rye. Tagging behind Charlie’s dad, the girls had all seen vegetable plants alive and abundant in the summer become lifeless, dormant stalks in the winter. The next summer those same dead plants would once again be magically resurrected with the weight of new growth. “Mommy, Poppy will grow back—right?” Emma had asked.

  For his birthday four months earlier, I had given Dad a brown leather journal, and on the front I had embossed the words Poppy Talk.

  Dad was going to write his story and impart all the wisdom he wanted his granddaughters to know.

  Mom told me that on his last night in the hospital, Dad had instructed the nurse to put the IV in his left arm to make sure he could use his right arm to write. He had more stories to tell. More he needed to say.

  There was so much Dad had tried to tell me, too, that I could not hear. I wanted to listen now. I wanted to play tennis with him now. I was ready to play the game now. I wanted him to see that I could work hard at something and never, never give up.

  You can do anything, Kathy, really, anything.

  He had imagined the unimaginable for me. The only way I could ever feel surrounded by his love again was to prove him right.

  eight

  WORKING MY WAY HOME

  Whatever we choose, however we decide to use our days, the shape of our days becomes the shape of our lives.

  —Wayne Muller1

  You can do anything, Kathy, really, anything. The thought haunted me after Dad died.

  What could I do that mattered?

  At thirty-five I was an accidental tourist in my own life. I had built the family I had craved and a career I reasonably enjoyed, but as far as any dreams, I had none. Somewhere between the three pregnancies and the baby weight that had never gone away, I had become sedentary, just watching my life from the safety of my couch.

  My father’s death dislodged my complacency. Something inside began to stir, urging me to think differently. I was not willing anymore to let my life happen to me. I needed to do something, risk something, but I felt stuck.

  One week during a third-grade after-school meeting for Kailey’s class, I overheard one of the moms, Sarah Belk, talking to her friends. “I am going on a weeklong horse pack trip in the Wind River Range with three of my kids! We will be riding horses and sleeping in the wilderness in teepees!”

  I loved horses but had not ridden since summer camp when I was in third grade. I had never camped in the wilderness.

  “You should come!” Sarah’s face lit up as she spoke to me. Her brown eyes were inviting, and her hand gestures welcoming. “It’s going to be so fun and even better if our girls can hang together!”

  That was how I found myself riding horses up a mountainside with Lauren and Kailey in the summer of 1999. Charlie stayed home watching the twins. Sarah was riding ahead with three of her five children following our leaders, a married couple, Abie and Grant Beck of Pinedale, Wyoming. Although we were roughly the same age, Abie had a long blond ponytail swinging out of her baseball cap, bulging biceps, and slim Levi’s that would have never fit my thighs. That morning she had expertly packed eleven horses and two mules while Grant sipped his coffee and smoked cigarettes over a campfire. Abie was now fearlessly leading us nine thousand feet into the completely untouched Bridger Wilderness.

  “Isn’t this awesome?” Sarah gushed, looking back over her shoulder at me. “I am so glad you all came!”

  I tried to give her an equally enthusiastic grin, but my knees were already screaming at me, and I seemed to have no muscle memory of saddles from third-grade summer camp. We were making our way to the highest point of our trip, which Abie lovingly referred to as “Grant’s Peak.”

  Looking nervously at the peak, I wasn’t sure I could make it because it looked like something out of The Sound of Music only with more boulders. It took us all morning to reach the base, and now we were dismounting to summit on foot.

  “Oh, Lordy,” Sarah said—her favorite southern expression coming out as we sweated, climbing over each gray obstacle.

  It was a steady uphill climb made easier at times by giant rocks that formed a virtual staircase to the top. Just short of the peak we encountered a vast snowfield. Our kids, dressed only in their T-shirts and jeans, slid across it, pretending to snowboard in their cowboy boots. Clouds were gathering, so we hurried to the “Top of the World,” as Abie called it. We cheered as we made the summit, Sarah and I high-fiving and our kids gathered around us taking photos of the triumph.

  The day had started out a beautiful seventy degrees, but now the clouds were thick and angry looking. We scrambled down trying to beat the storm and the thirty-degree temperature drop. Booming thunder rocked the sky as hail began to pop around us. As we pulled thin raincoats over the T-shirts and jeans, realization set in. We were a two-and-a-half-hour wet horseback ride from our camp, and this storm was not stopping.

  During the next two hours, I fantasized about a lot of things. A truck to come pick us up. A lodge to rise up in the distance. A longer raincoat. None of them magically appeared.

  An hour into the misery, Kailey turned in her saddle to look back at me and wail, “I’m so cold, Mom, I can’t go anymore.”

  Fearing mutiny from all the kids if one buckled, I channeled an inner-general voice I didn’t know I had. “You will, Kailey. We all will because we have no choice.”

  Kailey looked stunned not to receive a more motherly rescue solution. She whipped around in her saddle and hunkered into a silent wet lump for the rest of the ride.

  When we finally sloshed into camp, all our kids were so frozen in their saddles we had to help them off their horses. We ducked into our teepee, peeling off soaking jeans, and I zipped Lauren and Kailey shivering into their sleeping bags. I tried to think how I would entertain them without leaving the six-foot shelter for the rest of the night.

/>   “Have Dad and I ever taught you to play poker?”

  By the light of our battery lantern, we played Texas Hold’em as we belted out all the words we could remember to our favorite Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain songs. We finished the evening with a rousing round of “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.”

  The funny thing is, I really did finally feel like a woman. A strong, capable, I-can-do-anything woman. We salvaged that day, that night, and then the whole trip. I did things I never thought I could do and used muscles I had forgotten I possessed.

  This trip was exactly as I had hoped. I’d never be the same.

  I had heard Dale Mullennix speak once at the Urban Ministry Center about serving the homeless. Dale said one of his volunteers told him he was “ruined for life” after working there because he could never look at a plate of food the same way again. Having witnessed at the UMC the reality of having nothing, he would always be incredibly grateful for everything.

  After that week in the Wind River Range, I felt the same. I’d never look at my bed the same way again. Or my shower or a rainstorm. All week it had taken so little to be happy. A campfire. A sunny day. Chocolate in my trail mix at lunch. And I knew that when I looked at Lauren and Kailey, I would now know they could handle anything.

  I was ruined for life and grateful for it.

  Charlie met us in the airport at the baggage claim. When our duffle came up, I instinctively stepped in front of him and hoisted it easily off the belt as I had been doing all week.

  “Whoa!” he said laughing. “What happened out there?”

  “I think I found myself,” I answered.

  “I didn’t know you were lost.”

  “I truly didn’t either.”

  That trip created a new restlessness inside me, and I vowed I was not going to sleepwalk through my life anymore. I wanted to quit my graphic-design job, but economically that was hard to justify. I had a great business with good clients who paid me well and a home office where I set my own schedule. But I was no longer happy being just Graphics Girl. I wanted to do something that mattered.

  Almost nine years would go by as I wrestled with what I wanted to be when I grew up. I considered graduate school, but that seemed impossible with children. Besides, I had no idea what I would study. I wandered the aisles of bookstores looking for books on career change that might have the magic answer to my midlife misery.

  How would I know what I was meant to do? I kept waiting for that aha moment, like the one when I met Charlie and knew he was the one. My moment of purpose would surely present itself to me now that I was searching for it.

  I kept busy with work and volunteering while I waited for my life to find me. I joined the boards of several organizations in Charlotte and tried helping nonprofits with good causes: education, mentoring, and even an orphanage in Africa. My life was busy but not full.

  I was still in search mode when my horseback buddy Sarah and her husband, Tim, invited us to attend a “Forty Years of Service” fundraiser for Outward Bound. The evening was a tribute to one volunteer, Rufus Dalton, who had left an indelible mark on the organization by his sustained dedication to their mission for over four decades. His singlemindedness made me think about all my scattershot efforts in the past few years. Maybe that was the reason I hadn’t found something that mattered—I had never stayed with one thing long enough.

  As we drove home, Charlie asked, “So what would your forty-year thing be?”

  I didn’t have any idea. For almost twenty years I had been able to study a problem and distill it down to a single, simple solution for my clients. A logo. A headline. A tagline.

  But now I was the client. I needed an idea. And I could not think of a single one. Not one thing I felt capable of accomplishing that would matter in this world.

  Where was the big idea for my life?

  In February 2007, it arrived. And I never saw it coming.

  I started reading a book Mom had recently told me about: Same Kind of Different As Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. Honestly, I picked it up only to give me something, besides retirement homes, to talk about with my mom. We had started the dreaded family conversation about Mom’s selling her house and downsizing.

  The book grabbed me from the beginning and never let go.

  The story tells how Ron Hall went to the Fort Worth Union Gospel Mission after cheating on his wife, Debbie, because he thought that following her passion to the soup kitchen would be a way to make amends. But once there Ron allowed himself to truly know and care for one person—Denver Moore.

  “You is blessin’ folks with your dollars and service,” Ron used to hear Denver say, “but a dollar bill and plate of food ain’t changin’ a life.”

  As crazy as it might seem, Ron and Debbie invited Denver—who had been thirty years homeless—to come into their home, their lives, and after that nothing was the same.

  I had been serving soup with a smile for years, but how many people was I truly helping? How many people did I really know?

  I finished the book, but it wouldn’t leave me. In fact, it haunted me. Ron and Debbie had done something—they ended one person’s homelessness. For all my service at the soup kitchen, I had never done anything even close to that. The book sat on my bedside table, and every time I saw the cover, I heard the strangest thought whispering over and over: invite them to Charlotte.

  A few days after finishing the book, I composed an e-mail to Ron, introducing myself as a board member of the Urban Ministry Center (true) and asked if he would consider coming to North Carolina for a planned fundraiser (false).

  I pressed send and immediately regretted it.

  Full of guilt, I stared at the key that had launched my lie into cyberspace. I hoped Ron didn’t read e-mails or, if he did, he would delete mine.

  Twenty minutes later a reply from Ron blinked in my in-box:

  Yes, we do accept speaking engagements. When is your event?

  I could feel perspiration begin to form as I typed a complete lie:

  I need to get with my committee, but hold the second week in November.

  The next day I sheepishly walked into Dale Mullennix’s office with a copy of Ron and Denver’s book to confess I had accidently booked a speaker for a fundraiser we had not planned. After some small talk I started bumbling through an explanation of Same Kind of Different As Me, noting what a huge following it had in Texas. I tried to interject some spiritual references, mentioning the book was in some weird way calling to me.

  Neither of us was sure what we were agreeing to, but I left his office with a skeptical yes: I would plan a “friendraiser” around Ron and Denver’s visit to help raise awareness for the UMC.

  A few days later I gathered with three friends, including Sarah, in a restaurant booth to celebrate Angela Breeden’s birthday. I explained to them what had happened when I e-mailed Ron.

  “Ooh, Kathy, this sounds like a great book and a great idea!” Sarah said, even though she had never heard of Same Kind of Different As Me.

  Everyone at the table agreed and was caught up in the infectious excitement. “I’ll run the bank!” Angela offered.

  “I’ll host a party for Ron and Denver!” said Kim, Sarah’s sister-in-law.

  “We can order a bunch of copies and give them to our friends to start firing people up!” Sarah said.

  No one at the table had ever orchestrated something like this, but we had all helped with church and school events. We felt that together we might be able to pull it off.

  We set the date for Thursday, November 14, 2007, and since it was approaching Thanksgiving, we brainstormed a title for our luncheon: True Blessings. The idea was to create an inspiring event before the holidays with a true message about homelessness from Ron and Denver. We wouldn’t charge anyone to come. We hoped the day would be so moving that friends would write checks to help cover the cost of food and the expenses of getting the famous authors here from Texas.

  I felt terrified but exhilarated. I couldn’t see how any of
this was going to turn out, but it also felt like I was going in the right direction for the first time in a long while.

  nine

  GOING FOR A RIDE

  The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

  —W. Somerset Maugham1

  I picked up Ron and Denver on Wednesday, November 13, 2007, at the Charlotte airport, trying to appear confident. Our little group of moms had been overly successful, and the planned small event for one hundred guests at church had mushroomed into over one thousand people who wanted to come support the homeless. We had moved the event twice to accommodate the expanding crowd and finally booked Charlotte’s largest ballroom. The past few months I had lost a lot of sleep wondering why I had ever listened to that whisper to invite Ron and Denver to Charlotte.

  When the dynamic duo got into my car, however, they were not exactly living up to their press. The pair billed as having an amazing and “unlikely friendship” arrived for our event in a silent feud. In the car on the way to lunch, Ron explained the rift.

  A couple of nights before, they were honored guests at a fundraising dinner in Texas. Former first lady Barbara Bush had read their book and invited them to “A Celebration of Reading” promoting literacy.

  News of this high-profile engagement shocked me. I had no idea they were in such demand when I sent my e-mail six months before. Ron laughed, telling me Denver’s famous quote about the Texas event: “I done gone from livin’ in the bushes to eatin’ with the Bushes. God bless America, this is a great country!”

  Although Denver had now been off the streets for years, he still had a habit of wandering off when it suited. The night of the big event for the first lady, Denver had been seated at the head table with former president George H. Bush. During dinner, Denver had gotten up from the table and simply walked home. As Ron related all this on the drive from the airport, he was obviously still fuming that he and the Secret Service had spent hours searching for the missing honored guest.